NBN's Sky Muster communications satellite blasted into orbit in October, with plans to launch a second satellite later this year. Between them they'll offer regional and remote Australia access to download speeds of 25 Mbps, replacing the Interim Satellite Service which is groaning under the load.

This might not sound like much to get excited about if the NBN is rolling 100-Mbps fibre down your suburban street, but Sky Muster will be a real game-changer for Australians who live off the beaten track. These people were never going to get fibre to the premises – even under the original NBN plan, seven per cent of remote dwellings were going to end up on satellite or fixed-wireless.

It's easy to forget that many Australians in the burbs are languishing on sub-5 Mbps DSL which craps out in the rain, or even dial-up, thanks to the hotch potch nature of our communications infrastructure. I live within 10 kilometres of the Melbourne CBD on the end of a flaky DSL connection. I was rather jealous at this week's Sky Muster demonstration in Brunswick as we streamed ABC iView and Netflix simultaneously from the satellite while conducting a Skype video call and surfing the web.

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Internet Service Providers will start signing up customers via Sky Muster in April/May, offering a choice of 25/5 Mbps and 12/1 Mbps plans. At the demonstration we clocked impressive download speeds of 25.1 Mbps and upload speeds of 3.25 Mbps, although the 654 millisecond ping times will obviously frustrate some users. This didn't have a significant impact on our Skype video call but serious gamers won't be happy with the lag.

This is the nature of satellite – Sky Muster ping times will always be more than 500ms by the time the signal bounces off the satellite and back to one of 10 ground stations spread around the country which tap into the NBN backbone.

Thankfully satellite customers should be less at the mercy of their neighbours' downloading habits than people relying on HFC cable, according to NBN's tech people. The satellites cover the country with 101 spot beams and each beam has its own capacity, with smart networking to ensure heavy users don't hog the bandwidth. The two satellites will be five degrees apart in the sky, with NBN allocating different premises to different satellites and spot beams to balance the load. The network will also employ content caching to speed up web browsing.

Not every regional home will look to the sky for broadband

Not every home currently on the Interim Satellite Service will migrate across to Sky Muster. Some will switch NBN's fixed-wireless network instead, which should serve them better. This service also requires a fixed antenna on your roof, it's not a mobile broadband service like the phone networks.

Despite talk of minimum speeds there's no actually end user speed guarantee, regardless of how you're connected to the NBN. Thankfully you won't be switched across from satellite to NBN fixed-wireless unless the installer's tests confirm that your fixed-wireless signal strength and quality is good enough that you can realistically expect to get the 25-50/5-20 Mbps speed offered with the top-tier fixed-wireless plans, says NBN's Gavin Williams – executive general manager of wireless and satellite new developments.

It's interesting that they're referred to as 25-50 Mbps plans rather than 50 Mbps plans, but even if you just fall over the line you've still got the benefit of fixed-wireless' lower ping times which sit around 50ms. We're still waiting to see how the NBN treats metro customers stuck with a flaky fibre to the node connection due to dodgy copper in their street

NBN is running a 200-home Sky Muster trial in Victoria this month so it will be interesting to see how it holds up under load. Do you live outside fixed-line broadband footprint? How do you connect to the internet?